Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Family In Fiction

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We often speak of a family circle, but there are none too many of them. ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

There’s no question about it: sometimes it’s a lot easier to write about orphans. I’ve observed this tendency in books and discussed it with other writers before. There’s a certain freedom in writing about a character with no family ties—they’re free to move about where they will; the decisions they have to make affect no one but themselves. In a simpler type of story, a shortcut to eliminating the complications of relationships and background is just to leave your character alone in the world! It’s occurred to me, too, that this concept may be responsible for the epidemic of motherless heroines (particularly rampant in Westerns!). A girl who has a close relationship with her mother, or at least a mother closely involved in her life, will naturally have a mother’s input and advice on difficult decisions or problems that she faces. An orphan or a motherless girl is thrown on her own resources—do authors feel that this situation is more interesting to the reader? (A rare variant on this theme appears in Louis L’Amour’s High Lonesome, where an aging ex-outlaw worries over how to best counsel his motherless daughter on the verge of womanhood.)

But anyway, the orphan or loner protagonist can eventually become cliché (quick: name a Shirley Temple movie where she has two biological parents who are both still alive at the end), or, to go a little deeper, using them too often can cause us authors to miss out on an extra level of depth that we can add to our stories simply by making our characters part of a family.

The “loner” protagonist has long been a standard feature of the Western. That freedom of the unattached protagonist works better in an action-focused story, no doubt. As I remarked once before, yes, there were certainly plenty of unattached men in the Old West, especially in the professions of cowboy, soldier, explorer, et cetera…but don’t overlook the fact that much of the settling and taming of America was accomplished by families. And they certainly had their fair share of adventure, so their experience was no less interesting! In past centuries, the family was regarded as the most important unit in society, not only in the emotional sense but in the practical. Family members relied on each other in both senses as they forged their way in new or isolated territory. Parents, children and frequently extended family members all contributed their share to making a livelihood and home life. Multi-generational families living together were much more common—foreign as that may seem to our modern society, in which, if authors of magazine articles are to be believed, it’s necessary to practically draw chalk lines down the middle of rooms for two generations to exist in the same house together. (That’s not saying that many modern families don’t need the chalk lines, but that’s beside the point…)

I think one of the reasons that I like B.M. Bower’s Westerns so much is that she did not limit herself to that “loner” type of character and plot; nearly all of her books feature family of some shape and size, and the resulting relationships add additional color and enhance the plot. She wrote several mother characters who were not only very much alive and present, but strong, positive personalities (Points West, Rim o’ the World), as well as her share of fretful or negligible ones (Her Prairie Knight). She wrote fathers who make their families miserable (Hay-Wire, The Singing Hill) and intelligent, likable fathers who have affectionate relationships with their offspring (Skyrider, Fool’s Goal). There are close sibling relationships and strained ones; a pair of novels deal with the bitter consequences of a parent favoring one child over another (The Dry Ridge Gang, Open Land). I’m not as big a fan of Zane Grey, but I do notice that the books of his I found most interesting often have some kind of family dynamic as part of the plot and conflict (Forlorn River, Raiders of Spanish Peaks, Code of the West, Sunset Pass).

Do you see the variety? And yet all of these books are very much traditional Westerns, with their fair share of outlaws, cattle, action and romance. It would apply to any type of historical fiction, though. Putting a character in a family instantly adds extra layers to their personality, in the relationships and the responsibilities that are a natural part of family life. Depending on the people involved, these can be the most wonderful, supporting relationships and improving responsibilities in their lives, or the most difficult relationships and heaviest responsibilities. Another variant would be to take that orphaned or loner protagonist and put them into a family situation—learning or re-learning how it is to live as part of a family could be another whole layer of conflict for them. The possibilities are endless—as endless as the varieties of human beings and human relationships that exist.

(And incidentally, the Shirley Temple movie I described above does actually exist. See if you can name one of the two I’m thinking of!)

image: “The Homesteaders” by W.H.D. Koerner

Fifteen Ways to Lose Your Love Interest (Or, the TV Western Writer’s Guide to Disposing of Female Guest Stars)

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If you’ve watched classic TV Westerns for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed something about the recurring characters of any given series: they can’t seem to make a romantic relationship stick. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Curse of the Cartwrights, but it is by no means limited to that one unfortunate family. (Or perhaps the Virginian was just a distant cousin of theirs; I don’t know.)  If “the hero gets the girl” was a cliché of the Western film, serial television turned it on its head and took it to the opposite extreme—even the most heroic of heroes just couldn’t make it to the altar. The real-life Old West must have had its share of bachelors, surely, but they couldn’t possibly have been jilted, bereaved and left in the lurch as many times as the cowboys of the small screen.


But it wasn’t really the heroes’ fault, of course. The blame lies with screenwriters who seemed to be allergic to the notion of marriage for recurring characters. We all know the real reason for this, of course: they wanted the opportunity to write romance episodes as often as they liked, and a steady love interest—let alone a wife—would get in the way. This meant that they were forced to get quite creative in thinking up ways to get rid of their female guest stars once they’d gotten the requisite number of romantic scenes out of them. The following is a list of methods, ranging from the cliche to the highly original, for a love interest to make her exit. Lest you think I’m just romancing (pun intended), let me add here that most, if not all, are drawn from actual TV Western episodes that I’ve seen myself:

1. She transfers her affections to someone else.
2. She decides that the West isn’t for her and catches the first train back East.
3. She never forgives you for having to shoot her no-good father or brother.
4. She gets caught in the crossfire of the climactic gunfight.
5. She dies of a fatal illness.
6. She turns out to be married already, and her husband suddenly turns up.
7. She turns out to be part of the outlaw gang. (Variation 7b., a con artist.)
8. She reveals a secret about her past that makes you change your mind.
9. She is offered a lucrative position and decides to eschew marriage in favor of a career.
10. She is told she has talent and decides to eschew marriage in favor of becoming an actress, singer, artist, etc.
11. She decides she’d rather stay with the Indians who captured her.
12. She enters a convent.
13. You promise to “come back for her,” but inexplicably never do.
14. It turns out that she doesn’t actually exist.
15. She simply changes her mind.

Have I forgotten anything?

So far as I know, the only TV Westerns that included a married couple among the regular cast of characters were High Chaparral and the last few seasons of The Virginian, when the third owner of Shiloh Ranch was a married man. Does anyone know if there were any others?

Saving the Ranch

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Ranch near Laramie, WY, 1941 (photo by Marion Post Wolcott)

Anyone who is well acquainted with the Western genre is probably familiar with the plot device of the ranch in peril. Many Western films and stories feature a pretty girl and her father, or a widow, or perhaps a family, trying to keep their mortgaged ranch from being foreclosed upon by the villain of the piece. It’s up to the hero to raise the money, or, alternatively, expose the crookedness of the man holding the mortgage. It’s a plot seen often enough to have become a cliché of the genre. Looking a little closer, though, the time period at which this type of plot became prominent is interesting. From what I’ve seen, it’s not so prevalent in earlier Western fiction (e.g. 1900 through 1920s). Land was sometimes endangered, yes, by range disputes, the elements, and so on, but the mortgage theme in particular had not yet become a cliché. But as I noted in a book review last summer, some collections of Western short stories from the 1930s through the ’50s featured the ranch-in-peril plot in a significant number of the stories.

Several years ago I read a very interesting article (regrettably no longer available to read online) titled “Through the Great Depression on Horseback: Lawyers in Western Films of the 1930s” by Francis M. Nevins Jr. One particular paragraph struck me as illuminating, since I’d watched plenty of the B-Westerns Nevins is referring to, and his comments on the ranch-in-peril theme made perfect sense:

Dozens of Western films of the thirties dealt with the evil banker foreclosing or about to foreclose the mortgage on the ranch that the young lady and her father own. Today we laugh at this as a cliché, but I believe we must keep in mind that this story line wasn’t at all entertaining for the people who were watching these films in little towns in the western and southern and middle states of America during the 1930s. Losing their homes to a bank was the threat that dominated their lives; for many of them, it was reality. These little Western films, remember, were made by people who didn’t have much money, who weren’t making much money, and for people who didn’t have much money and weren’t making much money.

The point about the evil financier is very true. If you’ve watched any amount of this type of Western you’ve probably seen it lots of times, but it takes on new significance if you consider it in its Depression-era historical context. Many of the chief villains were bankers, lawyers, and slick businessmen of one sort or another, often masquerading as honest citizens for most of the film. (My siblings and I inadvertently coined our own term for this type years ago: suit-villain. The kind that always wears a suit and spends most of his time behind a desk scolding his henchmen for their inefficiency. Sometimes wears a thin moustache and often has a derringer hidden in his inside coat pocket.) A sterling example of the crooked banker in the B-Western is 1940’s Texas Stagecoach. Here a banker convinces the owners of a stagecoach line to borrow heavily from him to finance an ambitious road construction project, then has his accomplices maneuver them into a feud with a rival company and sabotage their work so he can eventually foreclose.

The ranch-in-peril was already considered a cliché by the late ’40s, if you go by the criteria that it was ripe for satire. Songwriter Jack Elliott took a poke at it in the tongue-in-cheek number “I Love the West,” sung by Dale Evans in the movie Bells of San Angelo:

…Where the hero, strong and styling
Keeps the little gal from harm.
Fightin’ twenty thousand Indians
Or paying off the mortgage on a farm…

I find it interesting that this plot device persisted even after the Depression ended. Did this plot device became an accepted and integral part of the Western genre because it had been particularly relevant at the time when the genre was developing and rising to great popularity? I‘ve always held that a film (and to some degree, a book or other work of art) bears the mark of the time it was created in some way, whether it’s costumes and hairstyles that reflect the popular fashions of the day instead of the historical period they’re supposed to be from, or, more subtly, the attitudes and opinions of the characters anachronistically reflecting the filmmakers’ modern sensibilities. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading old books—they have a flavor of their own time that even the best historical fiction is hard pressed to beat. While 1930s may not have been the only factor in the popularity of the ranch-in-peril plot, it’s fascinating to consider how they may have helped to inform and influence Western film to the degree that they shaped the standards of the genre even afterwards.

Some material in this post is drawn from one published a few years ago on a now-defunct prior blog of mine.